This invention relates to a device for holding a workpiece, particularly a cylindrical workpiece, to permit radial cutting of the workpiece into two or more segments.
In cutting a workpiece into segments with a manual or power saw, it is imperative that something hold the device during the cutting. In cutting small workpieces or objects with a power saw, the holding device can be some type of clamp or holding tool. In cutting small flat objects with circular sides such as cylinders into two or more segments with a manual or power saw, the objects may tend to spin or slip as the blade first contacts the curved surface of the workpiece. Such movement could not be tolerated in the precision cutting of objects for industrial application. Also, such cutting could be laborious and time-consuming if performed without any cutting guides.
In the production of glass fibers objects with arcuate surfaces are used to gather the fibers into one or more strands. The glass fibers are commonly attenuated from molten glass through orifices in a bushing. The number of these orifices can range from about 200 to 4,000 or even more. These individual filaments are coated with a lubricant binder and/or sizing composition. The treated filaments are gathered into one or more unified strands by a gathering shoe. Also a number of gathering shoes can be used to collect a number of fibers into several unified strands. Such shoes are conventionally formed of materials such as graphite, tetrafluorethylene and the like. The gathering shoes have generally flat top and bottom sections with circular sides has a channel in which the glass fibers contact the shoe and to form the unified strand. In the production of the glass fibers as the fibers contact the shoe, the gathering shoe can be stationary or it can rotate. When the fibers contact the gathering shoe and are collected into one or more strands, the fibers and strand only occupy a portion of the peripheral channel in the circular shoe. Therefore, when the gathering shoe or shoes are stationary, a segment of the circular gathering shoe can be used. Traditionally, the segment that is used is a quarter segment but any other fractional segment of a shoe that would be effective in gathering the fibers into one or more strands can be used.
In the past, segments of circular gathering shoes have been cut by hand on a power saw. The precision of such cutting is variable due to the manual cutting method so the cut segments are not uniform in size. This nonuniformity may arise because the saw in first contacting the curved surface of the circular shoe may have a tendency to slip because the shoe is not held firmly enough during this contact. Any large nonuniform quarter segments can be ground to the desired size but the small nonuniform segments are generally discarded.
By means of the present invention, the radial cutting of a workpiece and particularly a flat, circular workpiece with a generally cylindrical shape such as a gathering shoe, can be performed in less time and with improved precision and uniformity of the cut segments to reduce material waste.